When you think of home, you generally feel a warm feeling in your chest, and you would describe your house as safe and it almost exists in a separate plane from the realities to bog the world down today. However, the ‘haunted house’ sub-genre flips this notion on its head and finds terror inside the house. Both Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity achieved this sensation as it seemingly consumed both Katie and Micah by the end of Paranormal Activity and drove the Freeling family from their house.
Chiefly, a house can be a symbol for many things, and in Paranormal Activity, I believe that it operated as a way to show the degradation of a relationship between Katie and Micah. At the beginning of the movie, we see that Katie and Micah take a huge step in their relationship by moving in together. In this stage of a relationship, often people decide if they want to stay together or go separate ways and the hauntings that the audience sees may be problems that are starting to arise within their relationship now that they are living together. Furthermore, Katie mentions that she has lived with these entities her entire life. Personally, I believe that these demons may represent a mental health issue. Moreover, Micah is dismissive of these “hauntings” and feeds into the stigma that surrounds mental health disorders just as people who claim that their house is haunted are often laughed at in the public sphere. Therefore, the problems get worse and lead to the ultimate breakdown of their relationship.
Something that I found interesting in both Poltergeist and Paranormal Activity was that they both use technology as the forefront of their stories. In Poltergeist, Carol Anne is sucked into the television and can only be heard on a specific channel. Similarly, the entire premise of Paranormal Activity was the reliance on a camera to record the activity that happens when both Katie and Micah fell asleep. Personally, I believe that this might be a commentary on the world in which we live in today. We rely on technology, but very few of us truly understand all the working pieces that are involved with technology and in some sense that can have the same mysticism surrounding it as ghosts living in your home does.
Another similarity I found between the two was the idea that the supernatural is attracted to perceived innocence and helplessness. As a society, we generally agree with the notion that children are the most innocent and helpless amongst us and that (from a societal paradigm) women are also inherently more helpless and innocent than men. In both movies, the ghosts are drawn to the most helpless of both families, Katie for Paranormal Activity and Carol Anne in Poltergeist. In both these movies, the ghosts grow stronger from this innocence and the more helpless these characters are, the stronger the ghosts become. This is best seen as Katie becomes more resigned to the ghosts toward the end of the movie and allows it to go from small oddities at the beginning of the movie to Micah’s murder by the end.